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views:

36

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3

I am a ten-year veteran of ASP.NET and C# development and I'm moving into a position where I will be doing much more Windows Forms and WPF development. I have minimal experience with these technologies.

Can you recommend any good books or resources that will help me ramp up on these technologies quickly? I'd like to find resources that skip over basic .NET programming topics and get right to the heart of good application architecture, design and implementation.

+3  A: 

There are many resources on windowsclient.net. This is the official, Microsoft run Windows Forms and WPF site.

That being said, I'd recommend only trying to get a very basic idea of Windows Forms, and instead, focus on learning WPF. This will help for Silverlight development, as well. WPF is the newer technology, and really is a better path going forward for future proofing yourself. By learning it first, you won't have to unlearn many bad habits you'll pick up with Windows Forms development.

Reed Copsey
True that WPF is better moving forward, but when you're going into an environment with a substantial WinForms investment, the future can be slow in coming.
John Bledsoe
@jmbledsoe: Yes, but - that being said, if you're trying to learn both, I'd still recommend learning WPF **first**. It's much easier (though painful) to transition from WPF to Windows Forms - going the other way requires "relearning" (or unlearning) a lot of information.
Reed Copsey
A: 

Take a look at MEF and Prism if you are looking for good WPF application design. As for books - I'd recommend Apress' Pro WPF in C# 2008 (Don't know when it will be updated for 4.0, but relative few new things to learn here (mostly a few new controls and improvements in existing controls/syntax).

Goblin
A: 

I really liked this video by Jason Dolinger on the MVVM pattern for WPF. It is a really great into what you can do with WPF, how data binding works, and helps get you thinking in the right direction.

http://blog.lab49.com/archives/2650

jle